"You're wrong. I have loved you. God, how much! Do you think my years automatically preclude it? Well, Father de Bricassart, let me tell you something. Inside this stupid body I'm still young-I still feel, I still want, I still dream, I still kick up my heels and chafe at restrictions like my body. Old age is the bitterest vengeance our vengeful God inflicts upon us. Why doesn't He age our minds as well?" She leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, her teeth showing sourly. "I shall go to Hell, of course. But before I do, I hope I get the chance to tell God what a mean, spiteful, pitiful apology of a God He is!"
"You were a widow too long. God gave you freedom of choice, Mary. You could have remarried. If you chose not to remarry and in consequence you've been intolerably lonely, it's your own doing, not God's." . For a moment she said nothing, her hands gripping the chair arms hard; then she began to relax, and opened her eyes. They glittered in the lamplight redly, but not with tears; with something harder, more brilliant. He caught his breath, felt fear. She looked like a spider.
"Ralph, on my desk is an envelope. Would you bring it to me, please?" Aching and afraid, he got up and went to her desk, lifted the letter, eyed it curiously. The face of it was blank, but the back had been properly sealed with red wax and her ram's head seal with the big D. He brought it to her and held it out, but she waved him to his seat without taking it. "It's yours," she said, and giggled. "The instrument of your fate, Ralph, that's what it is. My last and most telling thrust in our long battle. What a pity I won't be here to see what happens. But I know what will happen, because I know you, I know you much better than you think I do. Insufferable conceit! Inside that envelope lies the fate of your life and your soul. I must lose you to Meggie, but I've made sure she doesn't get you, either." "Why do you hate Meggie so?"
"I told you once before. Because you love her."
"Not in that way! She's the child I can never have, the rose of my life. Meggie is an idea, Mary, an idea!"
But. the old woman sneered. "I don't want to talk about your precious Meggie! I shall never see you again, so I don't want to waste my time with you talking about her. The letter. I want you to swear on your vows as a priest that you don't open it until you've seen my dead body for yourself, but then that you open it immediately, before you bury me. Swear!" "There's no need to swear, Mary. I'll do as you ask."
"Swear to me or I'll take it back!"
He shrugged. "All right, then. On my vows as a priest I swear it. Not to open the letter until I've seen you dead, and then to open it before you're buried" "Good, good!"
"Mary, please don't worry. This is a fancy of yours, no more. In the morning you'll laugh at it."
"I won't see the morning. I'm going to die tonight; I'm not weak enough to wait on the pleasure of seeing you again. What an anticlimax! I'm going to bed now. Will you take me to the top of the stairs?"
He didn't believe her, but he could see it served no purpose to argue, and she was not in the mood to be jollied out of it. Only God decided when one would die, unless, of the free will He had given, one took one's own life. And she had said she wouldn't do that. So he helped her pant up the stairs and at the top took her hands in his, bent to kiss them. She pulled them away. "No, not tonight. On my mouth, Ralph! Kiss my mouth as if we were lovers!"
By the brilliant light of the chandelier, lit for the party with four hundred wax candles, she saw the disgust in his face, the instinctive recoil; she wanted to die then, wanted to die so badly she could not wait.
"Mary, I'm a priest! I can't!"
She laughed shrilly, eerily. "Oh, Ralph, what a sham you are! Sham man, sham priest! And to think once you actually had the temerity to offer to make love to me! were you so positive I'd refuse? How I wish I hadn't! I'd give my soul to see you wriggle out of it if we could have that night back again! Sham, sham, sham! That's all you are, Ralph! An impotent, useless sham! Impotent man and impotent priest! I don't think you could get it up and keep it up for the Blessed Virgin herself! Have you ever managed to get it up, Father de Bricassart? Sham!"
Outside it was not yet dawn, or the lightening before it. Darkness lay soft, thick and very hot over Drogheda. The revels were becoming extremely noisy; if the homestead had possessed next-door neighbors the police would have been called long since. Someone was vomiting copiously and revoltingly on the veranda, and under a wispy bottle brush two indistinct forms were locked together. Father Ralph avoided the vomiter and the lovers, treading silently across the springy new-mown lawn with such torment in his mind he did not know or care where he was going. Only that he wanted to be away from her, the awful old spider who was convinced she was spinning her death cocoon on this exquisite night. At such an early hour the heat was not exhausting; there was a faint, heavy stirring in the air, and a stealing of languorous perfumes from boronia and roses, the heavenly stillness only tropical and subtropical latitudes can ever know. Oh, God, to be alive, to be really alive! To embrace the night, and living, and be free!
